I was rooting for the Twins. Not so much because I'd rather face them in the ALCS, but because I'd rather they made it to the ALCS.

As some of you may recall, a couple of years ago Bud Selig and his cronies thought it'd be a good idea to lose a couple of teams in the league. An obvious contender was the Expos, who (if memory serves) were actually losing money every time they played a game, and whose stadium was rapidly approaching condemnation.

A not so obvious choice was the Minnesota Twins. See, they actually had a winning record. They had fans showing up to games. They were (and remain) a pretty solid team across the board. Why would such a team fall into even the same conversation as the Expos, when they competed in a market (the markets are big in the midwest, especially the northwest end of things) with the Milwaukee Brewers, another team that was in only slightly better shape than the Expos?

The problem with the Twins, evidently, was precisely the fact that it competed with Milwaukee (which, incidentally, competes even more closely with the two Chicago teams, but that's a different story). You see, Bud Selig used to own the Brewers. After a few years running the league, somebody pointed out the apparent conflict of interest, so he sold the team... to his daughter.

These days, the Brewers have something of a sweetheart deal going on, where they field relatively crappy teams for short money, and still get their share of the salary overage tax from teams like New York and Boston.

Bud, of course, wasn't going to dump his daughter's team, and when the story broke he was forced to rethink the whole plan. The new plan spares the Twins and moves the Expos to DC, where they'll rekindle the Senators name from days of yore. I'm not even going to get into the controversy about the Expos ownership change right before this stuff got going, netting a close friend of Selig's a metric assload of money in the near future.

Anyway, that's why I was rooting for the Twins. That, of course, and I feel the need to root against the Yankees anyway.

That being said, in a way, I'm glad the NYFY managed to advance. If this year is indeed to be the end of that which shall not be named, it would feel somehow incomplete if this matchup did not occur. After eighty-six years of buildup, it really is something that has to be done right.

So, with that in mind, let me be the first (and quite possibly only) ambassador of Red Sox Nation to congratulate the New York Yankees on a well played division series against a tough opponent. May our upcoming series be as lively and civil as the two that preceded it, and when the Sun rises on Sunday morning, may the series be ended and our flag still flying, planted deep into the chest of a pinstriped uniform.